Public Reference

Industry Primers

Bottom-up NAICS industry primers written for both public-market and private investors. Leaf industries are researched from the ground up; every group, subsector, and sector above them reads as a contrast across the industries beneath it.

2122 industries · 24 sectors · NAICS 2022

Researched with AI assistance from official U.S. statistics and independent sources, with citations on every page. Figures are not individually verified against pinned evidence — primers marked Evidence-verified are. Industry research, not investment advice. Methodology.

GroupNAICS 4248Wholesale Trade

Beer, Wine, and Distilled Alcoholic Beverage Merchant Wholesalers (NAICS 4248) — A Histometrics Industry-Group Primer

This is a rollup page. NAICS 4248 is a four-digit industry group in the U.S. wholesale-trade taxonomy. It combines the two businesses that move America's alcohol from producers to the shops and bars that sell it: beer distribution (NAICS 42481) and wine-and-spirits distribution (NAICS 42482). Both are covered in full in their own primers; this page's job is the contrast between them — who is bigger, who is growing, who owns them, and how the economics differ — before summing them into the group as a whole.

1. Overview

NAICS (the North American Industry Classification System, the standard government scheme for grouping businesses) puts every alcohol wholesaler — the "middle tier" of the U.S. drinks system — inside one four-digit box: 4248. These are the distributors: companies that buy beer, wine, and spirits from producers and importers, warehouse the inventory, and sell and physically deliver it to retailers — liquor stores, grocers, restaurants, and bars. They take ownership of the product (buy it, resell it) rather than just brokering, and with narrow exceptions they never sell to the public. They neither make the drinks (that is manufacturing — breweries 312120, wineries 312130, distilleries 312140) nor pour them.

This tier exists by law. After Prohibition, the 21st Amendment let states force a separation between the people who make alcohol, the people who distribute it, and the people who sell it to you — the three-tier system. That single design choice created a large, cash-generative, license-protected logistics industry sitting between the world's biggest drinks brands and the shelf. For investors the shape is unusual: a stable, moat-protected toll road on alcohol, but one now facing the sharpest demand softness and consolidation wave in a generation — sharp enough that on July 26, 2026 the tier's long-time No. 2 wine-and-spirits distributor filed for Chapter 11 to sell its businesses and wind down what remained [3][4][5].

The group splits into two halves that look similar from a distance but run on different economics: beer, a heavy, low-value-per-case, delivery-intensive business locked into local territories by state franchise law; and wine-and-spirits, a higher-value, more consolidated business now being redrawn by an outright bankruptcy at the top. The rest of this page draws out that contrast.

2. What's inside — the two child industries and how they differ

NAICS 4248 has exactly two children, each with a single six-digit leaf beneath it:

NAICS level Code Name
Industry (5-digit) 42481 → 424810 Beer and Ale Merchant Wholesalers
Industry (5-digit) 42482 → 424820 Wine and Distilled Alcoholic Beverage Merchant Wholesalers (leaf: Wine and Distilled Spirits Wholesalers)

They are two genuinely different businesses under one regulatory roof. The federal figures let us put the contrast in hard numbers (details and sourcing in §3):

Table A — the two children by the numbers (federal ground truth)

Metric Beer (42481) Wine & Spirits (42482) Group (4248)
Receipts / sales (2022) ~$83.1B — 40% ~$125.0B — 60% ~$208.2B [2]
Firms (2022) 1,510 2,244 3,734* [2]
Establishments (2023) 1,915 — 39% 2,944 — 61% 4,859 [1]
Paid employees (2023) 116,337 — 54% 98,833 — 46% 215,170 [1]
Annual payroll (2023) ~$7.5B ~$9.2B ~$16.7B [1]
Sales per employee (derived) ~$0.71M ~$1.27M ~$0.97M
Avg. pay per employee (derived) ~$64,600 ~$92,900 ~$77,600
Avg. receipts per firm (derived) ~$55M ~$56M ~$56M
Top-4 firms' share (CR4) 23.3% 39.8% 25.4% [2]
CR8 / CR20 / CR50 30.8% / 40.5% / 52.9% 50.0% / 69.7% / 83.7% 35.7% / 49.4% / 63.4% [2]
Concentration index (HHI) 203.5 suppressed 261.9 [2]

*The group's 3,734 firms is slightly below the 3,754 you get by adding the two children — because ~20 firms wholesale both beer and wine/spirits and are counted once at the group level, not twice. A small sign of how the two halves overlap at the edges.

Note the one line where the halves are nearly identical: the average firm in each turns over roughly $55–56 million a year. The typical operator is the same size on both sides of the group; everything else about it differs. And read down the "share" columns and the two industries diverge in ways that matter:

Table B — the two children by character

Beer (42481) Wine & Spirits (42482)
Share of the group Smaller by sales (~40%) but bigger by headcount (~54%) Larger by sales (~60%), fewer people (~46%)
Economics Heavy, low-value-per-case, refrigerated, high-frequency delivery → labor-intensive; moves ~$0.71M of product per worker High-value-per-bottle, less bulky per dollar → moves ~$1.27M per worker, pays workers ~44% more (more sales/brand-building, less driving)
Concentration More fragmented (top-4 = 23.3%, top-50 = 52.9%) — state beer franchise laws lock in local territories and resist cross-market roll-ups [6] Far more concentrated (top-4 = 39.8%, top-50 = 83.7%) — consolidated into a few national houses
Direction of travel Slow, orderly secular volume decline; structurally stable tier Acute shakeout — the No. 2 in Chapter 11 [5], the leader retrenching, import tariffs biting the premium bottles
Ownership Almost entirely private, family-owned; a handful are brewer-owned (AB InBev reported 9 U.S. wholesalers at end-2025) [7]; no public pure-play Also private / family-controlled; no public pure-play — and the No. 2 is now being sold for parts in bankruptcy [5]
What the record says about market power DOJ research finds franchise-termination laws reduced craft-brewery entry and growth — the moat protects incumbent distributors [8] FTC sued the leader in Dec 2024, alleging it charged independent retailers 12%–67% more than favored chains for identical products (allegations, not findings) [9]
How to invest Indirect, via listed brewers/importers Indirect, via listed distillers/vintners

The headline contrast: wine-and-spirits is the bigger money mover, beer is the bigger employer. Beer is a trucking-and-refrigeration business; wine-and-spirits is a higher-margin, higher-skill selling business. And counter-intuitively, the half with the stronger legal moat (beer, protected by franchise law) is the more fragmented one, because those same laws make it hard to consolidate territories across state lines — while wine-and-spirits, freer to combine, concentrated into a handful of national houses [3][4][6].

Worth noting that both halves now have independent evidence that the moat is economically real, from opposite ends of the enforcement spectrum: the Justice Department finds beer franchise law suppressing new-entrant brewers [8], and the Federal Trade Commission alleges the wine-and-spirits leader exercising pricing power over small retailers [9]. The regulatory structure that protects the tier is the same structure now attracting scrutiny in both children.

For the structure of the business, the control-state wrinkle, and the leaf-level detail, see the 42481 and 42482 primers.

3. Size (this level's rollup figures)

These are our ground-truth federal figures for NAICS 4248 as a whole, and they sum the two children almost exactly (establishments and employment tie to the dollar):

Metric Value Source (year)
Sales / receipts ~$208.2 billion Economic Census, 2022 [2]
Firms 3,734 Economic Census, 2022 [2]
Establishments (locations) 4,859 County Business Patterns, 2023 [1]
Paid employees 215,170 County Business Patterns, 2023 [1]
Annual payroll ~$16.7 billion County Business Patterns, 2023 [1]
First-quarter payroll ~$4.24 billion County Business Patterns, 2023 [1]
Avg. pay per employee (derived) ~$77,600 from [1]

At ~$208 billion in wholesale receipts across ~3,700 firms, the average firm turns over roughly $56 million a year, and payroll runs about 8% of sales [1][2] — the signature of a thin-margin, high-throughput distribution business. The tier is a pass-through pipe, and the step-up to retail is large: U.S. retail sales of beer and malt beverages alone ran about $135 billion in 2023 [10], against the beer half's ~$83 billion of wholesale receipts.

One reassurance on the employment base: an independent federal series lands in the same place on the wine-and-spirits side, with BLS payroll-employment estimates putting 98,100 employees in NAICS 42482 as of March 2026 against Census's 98,833 for 2023 [4][11]. Two programs, two methods, essentially one answer.

Coverage caveats. The federal figures do not misstate the group so much as misstate it in opposite directions on each side — and the reasons are different per child:

  • Beer — understated, and the alternative counts disagree. Federal counts capture only establishments primarily engaged in beer wholesaling. Many real-world houses are closely held single-family operators, and many carry a large wine-and-spirits book (which reclassifies them into 42482) or self-distribute as breweries (312120). The National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA — the beer-distributor trade group) counts roughly 3,000 independent beer distribution operations and 135,000+ people, versus the federal ~1,915 beer establishments and ~116,000 beer employees [12]; NBWA also notes more than 20,000 licensed alcohol-beverage wholesalers once wine and spirits houses are included [10]. The gap is definitional, not an error in either count.
  • Wine & spirits — understated on people, but not a clean private-market receipts total. In 17 "control" jurisdictions (16 states plus Montgomery County, Maryland) a government agency performs the spirits-wholesale function itself [13], covering roughly a quarter of U.S. spirits volume [14] — so the establishment and payroll counts understate the tier's real footprint. But the revised child research corrects something this page previously asserted: the 2022 Economic Census makes an unusual coverage exception that includes government-owned establishments classified in this industry [15]. So the receipts line is not a measure of privately investable distribution either, and the group's ~$208 billion inherits that wrinkle from its wine-and-spirits half. For contrast on a self-reported basis, the wholesalers' trade group counts roughly 4,176 wholesaler locations, ~97,000 jobs, and over $9.3 billion in wages across the wine-and-spirits tier [16].

Also note the 2022 receipts figure is a gross pass-through of product value (not profit) and a high-water mark: volumes have contracted since. Treat the federal numbers as a clean, comparable core, not the full universe.

4. Investable universe (where value concentrates across the children)

Two facts define the investable picture, and they are the same for both halves of the group:

  1. Value is not evenly split. Wine-and-spirits holds ~60% of the group's receipts and beer ~40%, so on a pure sales basis the larger pool sits on the spirits side, and it is the more concentrated one (top-50 = 83.7% versus 52.9% in beer) [2]. But beer holds ~54% of the people and the more durable, franchise-protected local moats. There is no single "right" half — they are different risk-and-return profiles.

  2. Neither half has a clean public pure-play. Almost every large distributor in the group is private or family-controlled: - Beer: led by Reyes Beverage Group, which delivers roughly 360 million cases a year to ~240,000 accounts from a 90-facility, 15,000-plus-employee platform [17]; parent Reyes Holdings turns over about $40 billion and ranks as the 6th-largest U.S. private company [18]. Behind it sit houses like Silver Eagle, Ben E. Keith Beverages, Manhattan Beer, Columbia Distributing, and Hensley [19]. The top ~30 distributors move on the order of 800 million case-equivalents a year — roughly 30% of all U.S. beer [19]. - Wine & spirits: led by Southern Glazer's, which distributes roughly one in three bottles sold in the U.S. on about $26 billion of revenue (2023); Republic National (RNDC), the long-time No. 2, is in Chapter 11 and being sold for parts [4][5]; Breakthru Beverage, Reyes' RBG Spirits and Wine, and large regionals like Martignetti, Johnson Brothers, and Winebow fill out the roster [4]. - The crossover story: Reyes is the giant that now straddles both children. It bought RNDC's operations across about 11 markets, folding in roughly 5,200 employees, 135,000 customers, and 38 million annual cases to form RBG Spirits and Wine [20] — the clearest evidence yet that the two halves are consolidating into each other (see §8).

How much of a distributor's fate rests on a single supplier book is now visible in public filings from the producer side, and the same 10-K measures it in both halves: Constellation Brands disclosed that one beer wholesaler, operating through multiple entities, accounted for about one-quarter of its consolidated fiscal-2025 net sales, and that its Southern Glazer's arrangement covered approximately 60% of its U.S. branded wine-and-spirits volume [21]; MGP Ingredients disclosed a single distributor at roughly 16% of consolidated 2025 sales [22]. Those are supplier-side numbers, but they measure the same dependency from the other end.

Because the operators are private, listed exposure comes from the adjacent producer tier, not from 4248 itself (see §10 for tickers). The full company rosters and approximate scale are in the 42481 and 42482 primers.

5. How the money works

Both children run the same core model — spread-plus-logistics — with different dials. A distributor buys a case from a producer at the price-to-wholesaler, marks it up, and sells it to a retailer or bar at the price-to-retailer; out of that spread it funds warehouses, refrigerated storage, a delivery fleet, and a large field sales force. Beer works to roughly a 30% gross margin on the case [23]; wine and spirits runs ~28–30%, reaching 40%+ on small or imported brands the distributor has to build [24]. Net margins land in the low single digits on both sides, so profit is really volume × route density × brand mix. The metrics that matter are case volume (or "depletions"), gross margin per case, share of a supplier's "book," and route density.

The two halves weight those dials differently, and the federal data shows it:

  • Beer is a throughput-and-logistics game. Product is heavy, cheap per case, refrigerated, and reordered constantly, so beer moves only ~$0.71M of sales per employee — the cost base is trucks, fuel, warehouses, and (often unionized) drivers. Dated but useful benchmarks from a 2018 Mercer Capital study put selling expense at 5%–7% of sales, warehouse at ~3%, delivery at ~3%, and administration at 8%–10%, labor dominant in each [25].
  • Wine & spirits is more a selling-and-portfolio game. Bottles are higher-value and less bulky, so the tier moves ~$1.27M per employee and pays workers ~44% more — the spend tilts toward brand-building sales staff, importer relationships, and working capital on premium inventory [4].

The deeper difference is what the asset actually is. In beer, the exclusive franchise right is the balance sheet: rights are bought, sold, financed, and increasingly valued by discounted cash flow [6], and the Mercer study found distribution rights historically representing 80%–90% of enterprise transaction value, tangible assets the rest [25]. In wine and spirits there is no comparable statutory lock, so the asset is the supplier book itself — which is precisely what RNDC lost before it failed (§8). Same business model, two very different things being capitalized. For the full margin mechanics, see 42481 §5 and 42482 §5.

6. Demand drivers

The whole group runs on total alcohol volume — and it is currently soft. But in each half the two best available series disagree, and it is more honest to name the disagreement than to split it:

  • Beer: the Beer Institute put total U.S. beer supply down -1.8% in 2024 [26], while the Brewers Association reports total U.S. beer production and imports down 5.7% in 2025 [27] — different years and different measures, both pointing down.
  • Wine & spirits: the two series disagree on sign. The Distilled Spirits Council reports 2025 U.S. spirits supplier sales of about $36.4 billion, down ~2.2%, on volume that rose 1.9% to 318.1 million nine-liter cases [28]; the wholesalers' own SipSource depletion data shows combined wine-and-spirits volume down 7.2% and revenue down 5.8% through the first nine months of 2025, with wine down 8.5% against spirits down 5.9% [29]. Much of the gap is scope — supplier shipments into the tier versus depletions out of it — and distributor economics track the depletion side, because that is the volume actually moving through 4248.

The pressures underneath are shared. Gallup found 54% of U.S. adults reported drinking alcohol in 2025, the lowest reading in a trend that begins in 1939, and 53% now say moderate drinking is bad for health, up from 28% in 2018 [30]; add an aging drinker base and GLP-1 drugs (a class of appetite-suppressing weight-loss medications) that appear to curb alcohol cravings, alongside total wine volume down roughly 3–5% across 2024–2025 [31].

What differs is mix and defense. On the beer side, Mexican imports (Modelo, Corona) are taking share — ~82.5% of import volume in 2024 [26] — while craft volume fell 4% in 2025 to 22.0 million barrels, or 13.4% of beer volume [32], and non-alcoholic is growing fast enough that U.S. off-premise non-alcohol beer, wine, and spirits sales passed $1 billion in 2025 [33]. On the spirits/wine side, premiumization (consumers trading up to pricier bottles) has paused. Across the group, the one real growth pocket is ready-to-drink (RTD) canned cocktails — spirits-based premixed cocktails reached $3.8 billion of supplier sales in 2025, up 16.4%, while every other major spirits category declined [28] — and distributors defend revenue by diversifying beyond their core category. The two halves are deliberately blurring: NBWA members expect beer to fall to 67% of their book within five years, from 76% in 2025 [34]. See 42481 §6 and 42482 §6.

7. Regulation

Regulation is both the moat and the constraint for the entire group. Every wholesaler needs a federal basic permit from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) under the Federal Alcohol Administration Act before it may buy alcohol for resale, and the TTB enforces the "trade practice" rules that keep the tiers at arm's length and administers alcohol excise taxes [35]. The 21st Amendment then hands each state Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) authority broad power to license wholesalers and enforce the three-tier system and tied-house rules that keep producers, distributors, and retailers separate [13].

The two children then diverge on their signature legal feature:

  • Beer leans on state franchise/territory law: exclusive brand territories a brewer can terminate only for "good cause," often only by paying fair-market value for the rights [6] — the strongest single moat in the group, and one whose incumbent-protecting effect is measurable, with DOJ research finding these laws reduced craft-brewery entry and growth, more so where brewer-wholesaler integration was also restricted [8]. State law also sets whether a brewer may own distribution at all, which is why AB InBev owned just 9 U.S. wholesalers at the end of 2025 with the rest of its network independent [7].
  • Wine & spirits is shaped by the 17 control jurisdictions that run the spirits tier themselves [13][14], plus a patchwork of state franchise laws that make distribution rights durable — which is exactly why the current supplier defections (§8) are so disruptive where terminations are permitted. Pushing the other way, direct-to-consumer (DTC) shipping keeps nibbling at exclusivity: wineries won broad DTC rights after Granholm v. Heald (2005) and Tennessee Wine v. Thomas (2019), spirits DTC remains far more restricted, and legislatures see dozens of DTC bills a session [36].

The shared long-run policy risk is any loosening of the three-tier model — DTC shipping, self-distribution carve-outs, e-commerce. See 42481 §7 and 42482 §7.

8. Consolidation

Nationally the group is fragmented; locally it is concentrated. Across the whole of 4248 the top 4 firms hold 25.4% of receipts, the top 8 35.7%, the top 20 49.4%, and the top 50 63.4%, with a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI, a concentration gauge where under 1,500 is "unconcentrated") of just 261.9 [2]. But because exclusive territories mean one distributor per brand per market, any given town can have only one choice — national HHI is a poor proxy for competitive conditions here. On the beer side, most markets are effectively served by an Anheuser-Busch-aligned house and a Molson Coors-aligned house; by one estimate close to 90% of beer moves through distributors whose primary supplier is one of the two dominant brewers [37].

The two children sit at different points on the consolidation curve:

  • Beer is the more fragmented, slower-consolidating half (top-4 = 23.3%, HHI 203.5), shrinking by steady attrition rather than shock — though the published counts run on different bases and do not agree. On NBWA's company-level count, traditional distributors fell from 4,595 (1980) to ~3,000 (2020) [10]; on Beverage Marketing's stricter establishment count, from ~3,523 (1990) to ~1,386 (2021), about -61%, with small houses (<$10M revenue) collapsing from ~2,691 to ~502 while large houses (>$100M) grew from 21 to 151 [38]; federal CBP, on its own definition, counts 1,915 establishments in 2023 [1]. The direction is unambiguous even where the levels are not — but franchise law caps how fast the biggest houses can roll up territory.
  • Wine & spirits is the more concentrated, faster-moving half (top-4 = 39.8%, top-50 = 83.7%) and is now in an acute shakeout. RNDC, the long-time No. 2, exited California and put roughly a dozen markets up for sale [39], then filed Chapter 11 on July 26, 2026 to sell its businesses and wind down the remainder, saying prior transactions had preserved more than 5,000 jobs [5]. Even the leader is retrenching: Southern Glazer's is exiting California, selling control-state assets to Martignetti and markets to Reyes and Breakthru, cutting staff, and shifting toward an AI-assisted sales model [40] — while telling the trade it expects "continued consolidation" across all three tiers [41].

The through-line is Reyes, a beer-distribution powerhouse that absorbed RNDC's operations in about 11 markets into a new spirits-and-wine unit [20] — the two halves consolidating into each other, with the beer side supplying the acquirer and the wine-and-spirits side supplying the distress. The old mental model of two stable national wine-and-spirits incumbents no longer holds. Detail in 42481 §8 and 42482 §8.

9. Risks

The group carries one set of shared risks with a per-child accent:

  • Secular demand decline — moderation, aging drinkers, Gen Z, GLP-1 effects [30][31] — hitting both halves, currently sharper on spirits/wine.
  • Mix / margin compression — value lager and mainstream wine shrinking; growth shifting to categories with different per-case economics; the profitable premium and import bottles are the ones most exposed to tariffs.
  • Supplier concentration and defection — books anchored to one or two producers, as the producer-side disclosures make plain [21][22]; losing a top brand (or a brewer's forced brand transfer) can gut a market overnight, damaging route density, retailer relevance, and warehouse utilization at once.
  • Tariffs / trade — a 15% U.S. tariff on European wine and spirits took effect in 2025 [42], plus exposure to imported beer and aluminum [26].
  • Pricing conduct and antitrustnew to this page from the revised child research. The FTC sued Southern Glazer's in December 2024, alleging it charged independent retailers between 12% and 67% more than favored chains for identical products through discounts and rebates not justified by cost differences [9]. These are allegations, not findings of liability, but a tightening of Robinson-Patman enforcement would cut pricing flexibility and raise compliance costs across the whole tier, not just the defendant.
  • Regulatory erosion — DTC shipping, e-commerce, and any softening of the three-tier system disintermediate the tier [36].
  • Labor, insurance, fuel, and working capital — unionized drivers, refrigeration, commercial-auto insurance, and premium inventory tie up cash on thin margins (heavier on the beer side), with out-of-code product a direct hit to margin.
  • Customer concentration — as retail and on-premise chains consolidate, they squeeze distributor spreads.
  • Capital and succession — family-owned houses on both sides face generational transfer against rising scale requirements.

See 42481 §9 and 42482 §9 for how each plays out.

10. How to invest & outlook

There is no listed U.S. alcohol-distributor pure-play in either half of the group. Public-market investors express a view through the producers whose route to market runs through this tier:

  • Beer proxies (brewers/importers): Anheuser-Busch InBev (ticker BUD), Constellation Brands (STZ, U.S. Modelo/Corona), Molson Coors (TAP), Boston Beer (SAM) [43].
  • Wine & spirits proxies (distillers/vintners): Constellation Brands (STZ), Brown-Forman (BF.B), and MGP Ingredients (MGPI) domestically; Diageo (DEO), Pernod Ricard, LVMH, Campari, and Rémy Cointreau abroad [4].

Two classification traps are worth knowing before treating any of these as a proxy for this group. STZ spans both children — and its portfolio is heavily beer-oriented, which sits in 42481, not 42482 [21]. And MGP is labeled in SEC systems under SIC 5180 ("Wholesale—Beer, Wine & Distilled Alcoholic Beverages") despite being a branded-spirits and distilling-solutions company that sells to distributors rather than acting as one [22]. Neither is a merchant wholesaler; the cleanest public exposure is to brands and volume, valued on ordinary equity metrics, not to distribution economics.

Direct ownership of the tier is a private-market game. Regional and single-state distributors, importers and brand-building houses, and the B2B technology and logistics firms serving the tier are all privately held, gated by state licensing, franchise law, and producer consent. Diligence is idiosyncratic and differs by half: on the beer side it is brand rights by territory, gross profit per case and per stop, fleet and warehouse capacity, out-of-code inventory, and prior brand losses — with value largely the capitalized fair-market value of exclusive rights [6][25]; on the wine-and-spirits side it is supplier consents, franchise restrictions, receivables, pension and union obligations, and whether the acquired book carries enough route density to cover fixed logistics cost. The RNDC bankruptcy is actively creating distressed sellers and roll-up platforms under court supervision, so private equity (PE) and large family operators are the active buyers — a more opportunity-rich, and more perilous, moment on the spirits side than the steadier beer side.

Outlook. A stable, cash-rich, regulation-protected group facing a slow-to-shrinking top line. The near-term reality is managed contraction, not growth, and it favors the densest, most-diversified, most data-capable operators — the houses that blur beer, wine, spirits, and RTDs [34], and that gain scale as weaker rivals fold. Expect the crossover to continue: the beer-distribution platforms are the ones with the balance sheet to absorb wine-and-spirits distress [20][41]. The franchise-law and three-tier moats should persist, with three-tier deregulation the key structural risk to watch — now joined by antitrust attention to how the tier prices. For the complete how-to-invest logic, read the 42481 and 42482 primers.


Sources

Figures on this page are our ingested federal ground truth for NAICS 4248 and its two children (receipts, firm/establishment counts, employment, payroll, concentration ratios, and HHI) plus synthesis drawn from the two child primers and the sources they cite.

  1. U.S. Census Bureau. County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 4248 / 42481 / 42482 (establishments, employment, annual and Q1 payroll). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
  2. U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 Economic Census — Concentration / Receipts, NAICS 4248 / 42481 / 42482 (receipts, firm count, CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50, HHI). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
  3. Histometrics primer. NAICS 42481 — Beer and Ale Merchant Wholesalers (child), and its underlying federal ground truth.
  4. Histometrics primer. NAICS 42482 — Wine and Distilled Alcoholic Beverage Merchant Wholesalers (child), and its underlying federal ground truth.
  5. Republic National Distributing Company. RNDC Important Update (Chapter 11 announcement, July 2026). https://www.rndc-usa.com/rndc-important-update/
  6. Brewers Association / M. Sorini (McDermott Will & Emery). Beer Franchise Law Summary. https://www.brewersassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Beer-Franchise-Law-Summary.pdf
  7. Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV. Form 20-F, FY2025 (U.S. wholesaler ownership). U.S. SEC. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1668717/000119312526088105/d65314d20f.htm
  8. U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division. Franchise Termination Laws, Craft Brewery Entry and Growth. https://www.justice.gov/atr/abstract-franchise-termination-laws-craft-brewery-entry-and-growth
  9. Federal Trade Commission. FTC Sues Southern Glazer's for Illegal Price Discrimination (press release, December 2024). https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/12/ftc-sues-southern-glazers-illegal-price-discrimination
  10. National Beer Wholesalers Association. Industry Fast Facts (distributor history, retail sales, licensed wholesalers), 2024. https://nbwa.org/resources/fast-facts/
  11. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment and Earnings, April 2026, Table B-1b (NAICS 42482 employment). https://www.bls.gov/ces/data/employment-and-earnings/2026/table1b_202604.htm
  12. National Beer Wholesalers Association. Industry (beer-distributor count, employment), 2025. https://nbwa.org/industry/
  13. National Alcohol Beverage Control Association. Three-Tier System / Control Systems. https://www.nabca.org/three-tier-system
  14. Wikipedia. National Alcohol Beverage Control Association / alcoholic-beverage-control-state list (17 jurisdictions; ~24% of spirits volume), 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Alcohol_Beverage_Control_Association
  15. U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 Economic Census methodology (coverage of government-owned establishments). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census/year/2022/technical-documentation/methodology.html
  16. Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America (WSWA). Economic Impact of U.S. Wine & Spirits Distributors, 2024. https://www.wswa.org/data-and-impact/economic-database
  17. Reyes Beverage Group. About (cases delivered, accounts, facilities, employees). https://reyesbeveragegroup.com/about
  18. Forbes / Reyes Holdings. Reyes Holdings company overview (revenue, ranking), 2024–2025. https://www.forbes.com/companies/reyes-holdings/
  19. Beer Business Daily (beernet). The Top Beer Distributors (top-30 volume and share). https://beernet.com/bbd/bbd-article/the-top-beer-distributors/
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